Russia's best Jewish writer in the nineteenth-century, Lev Levanda (1835-1888), is still barely known in the English-speaking world. Here for the first time is one of his major novels in his entirety, An Amateur Performance (Reminiscences of a Student in the 1850s), translated with elegance by Hugh McLean and edited by Brian Horowitz and Conor Daly. This work from 1882 describes the rush by Jews to the government schools, secular education, and the lights of enlightenment.
